Freebies – The Gift Of Music From Cherry Suede

During this holiday season, twitter musicians have united to bring you free music. No strings attached. So enjoy a short interview with these great indie musicians, and then download to your heart’s content!

Meet Cherry Suede!

Cherry Suede knows that music is more than just notes: it’s a shared, powerful experience.

Randy Scott and Randy Young took the idea of music as a shared experience and extended that to the way they run the band. After playing six nights a week and releasing a well-received disc, they took a long look at how they were operating. Naturally, they wanted to play for people and make a buck, but traditional models weren’t cutting it for them – those models were often about the business, not the experience. The fans were considered consumers of a music product, and that wasn’t how Cherry Suede saw them.

The band wanted to reward the fans for paying to see their shows, bringing their friends, and even traveling hundreds of miles to see them. After considering a few ideas, they thought of something that would come to be one of the band’s defining features: they would give away their music. All of it. Licensed under Creative Commons, fans are free to download, distribute, and remix Cherry Suede songs as long as they credit the band and don’t resell the music.

This free distribution had a huge impact on their fan base. As fans spread the word, more and more people heard Cherry Suede. A core group of fans developed, eventually becoming the Cherry Suede Brigade. The CSB has been such a large part of Cherry Suede’s success that the band organizes special band-related trips and events for them. The CSB continues to grow, bringing more friends to shows and supporting Cherry Suede in both the real and virtual worlds.